Wonder Twins: SEO & Social Media Marketing

The sign of a truly classy conference? Miniature pastries. Yum! Have I mentioned how great the food (other than breakfast) is here? Now that lunch is merely a fond memory, it’s time for some good old fashioned superheroing.

Rand Fishkin is up first. He loves social media marketing. He attributes SEOMoz’s popularity entirely to social media marketing. Is Oprah social media now? He says we’re going to fly. I think he’s doing this to make my life harder. Luckily it’s just an intro and you already know much of this stuff.

How does SMM do its work? It’s by interacting with communities. You’re creating and promoting viral content. He’s got a map of single men vs single women geographically and while it SAYS that there are single men in my area, I’ll tell you now that’s a lie.

Why is SMM valuable? It supports branding and mindshare. [He’s got pictures though technically his mindshare picture is a mindmeld but E for effort.] It helps with traffic and conversions goals as well.

Why has social media become important?

Participation is up 668 percent

Blogosphere engagement is 30 percent in the 18-34 demographic and 34 percent of influencers are reading blogs in the US. In Japan it’s incredibly high.

He revisits the history of search. Oh, hey Superman! (The real one, not Brandon Routh or Tom Welling.)

Many link techniques were eventually diffused and it became harder to spam (except for “the guys at the back of the room” — Todd and Greg. [Hey, I didn’t say it. Rand did.])

So how do you get links now that people are reluctant to link? You have to read them through the linkerati? It’s not browsers or customers, it’s the people who are in social networks and who are spreading content to all their friends and connections.

As Rand sits down to take a breath, Neil Patel jumps up for his part of this session. He’s going to be doing case studies. I’ll just give you the non-specific stuff.
Big site marketed using:

Photo sharing

Social news

Social networks

Blogs

They had deep pockets so they were able to pay bloggers to talk about them as well.

People in the social space are young and kinda stupid. So they will link to things that are dumb and somewhat lame.

Barbara Boser is up next. She’s Neil’s biggest fan.

She got into social media in August. She’s had over 60 articles hit the Digg front page and she’s a top Stumbler.

There are hundreds of social media site on the Web. Obviously there’s only one Digg and the rest of them don’t even compare but you can use the same guidelines in most places. In any community you have to commit and participate. It takes daily commitment. Be prepared to spend hours and hours your first two months. You want to read and learn what’s popular in the different communities. Build a reputation. See what sites are popular on the community. Mak sure your profile isn’t similar to any top user’s profile. Never self-promote, or at least don’t get caught if you do. Choose a unique name and avatar. Get a gmail account and IM for your unique name and use the same persona across all sites.

Start with the top users.
Add people with IMs and introduce them.
Add friends who are supportive.
Avoid high maintenance friends.
Be one of the first to vote.
If you think it’s going to be popular, leave a comment so that people will see it and vote.
Stumble while you vote.
Submit from a variety of sources.
Learn to write titles in a way that matches the community.
Don’t submit more than 2-3 stories a day.
Don’t take anything personally. People will take your content and your stories but that’s just how it is.

Networking:
List your site profiles
List your IM
Don’t use multiple accounts on the same IP
Don’t ask users that you don’t know to submit for you
Don’t be annoying.

Social media friendly consumers are on the leading edge of technology. They’re comfortable with blogs, SMS, mobile.

When you play the news game it can bring a lot of traffic very quickly but the traffic will drop off. You need to try to convert them as soon as you can, get them to subcribe so they’ll come back. He shows a graph for [oscar fashions]. It’s a short lived term so you have to convert as you can.

Going green is a big topic now. So everyone wants to see how people are doing green things. Jump on fads to get attention.

Tips for getting the most out of Twitter
-build your profile before you try to build friends
-decide on the blend of information and sale messages
-use tools to post and automate as much as possible

He prefers Jana over Zan, because Zan’s powers are ridiculous. Just so you know.

Vanessa talks about using RSS to track buzz on your company via twitter. Whatever piece of viral marketing you’re doing, make sure you have hooks back into the rest of your site. You can build your customer base that way.

Michael points out What Would Seth Godin Do? It’s a wordpress plugin that will allow you to customize messages on your blog.

Q&A

How do people appeal outside of their niche?

Rand: There are infinite ways to reach out to people on the Web. Find something that’s truly interesting and you can still make an impact. If you see something interesting, just stumble it or digg it.

Michael: Some people don’t have a sense of humor and if you don’t have a sense of humor you’re going to have a harder time getting into social media.

Vanessa says Greg Boser isn’t allowed to ask Barbara questions.

I didn’t catch the question but the answer is:

If you have six people on the same IP, you’re going to get banned. Period. Don’t vote from the office, vote from home. Set up IP routing if you’re voting from the office.

Barbara: Vote for other things while you’re voting.

Michael: Schedule your voting to get things popular during the day.

Rand: Best times to go popular on Digg is Tuesday morning at 12 pm Eastern time. You want to get in front of bloggers and that’s when they’re checking.

What is the most effective social media site

Rand: YouTube — Potentially the most powerful because you can reach literally tens of millions of people. Digg has the potential for a 100,000 people at most. But YouTube has the potential for Millions.
Neil: Facebook — The traffic is continual and there’s no Matt Cutts to ban you.
Barbara: Stumbleupon — The traffic is good and you can get traffic on older posts and it’s quite a bit friendlier.
Michael: DiggStumbleuponDelicious — Disqualified for not giving ONE answer.

Rand: I’m worried that this sounds like we’re making this sound like spam. If you submit spam, you’re going to get buried. Your content is going to live or die on the quality of its content. Yeah, you can spam but it’s not going to be very effective. Spam away at the beginning but you can’t spam social media like you can spam Google.

[Lights just went out. They’re blaming Greg.]

Vanessa: You want to engage people who are useful, so it’s worth spending the time doing good content. Spamming doesn’t really help you because you’re looking to pull people in and talk about you.

Michael: I like to plan where I’m going to put something so I’m not just always throwing it in off beat stories.

Are there strategies you can employ to help influence the anchor text?

About the Author

Susan Esparza is former managing editor at Bruce Clay, Inc., and has written extensively for clients and internal publications. Along with Bruce Clay, she is co-author of Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies.

One response to “Wonder Twins: SEO & Social Media Marketing”

I agree to this ” One of the most important qualities of a successful SEO is a drive and ability to keep up with the ever-changing search space. ” So my answer to the question: Is it now a necessity for an SEO to have practical social media skills? Is simply NO

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